Laura Sandys, the chair of the Food Foundation thinktank and a former Conservative MP, said food insecurity had long-term health and social consequences. “We know that food insecurity can trigger a range of unhealthy eating habits and force people to buy cheaper, less nutritious and more calorific food.”

It’s tempting to wonder whether Bocuse’s pall bearers were able to detect a rapid, rotatory motion from within the load on their shoulders – tempting, too, to think that perhaps France should bury its much burnished self-image along with the master. For this, the home of haute cuisine and haughty chefs, the country of foie gras, baguettes and Charles de Gaulle’s celebrated “246 varieties of cheese” has a dirty secret: it has fallen in love with cheap, fast food.

Damn this modernity anyway. Who wants to solve that most pressing concern of the human condition, how do I fill my belly?

Campaigners are calling for a ban on promotions and price cuts for “sharing bags” of chocolates which many children and adults eat by themselves, consuming as much as 20 teaspoons of sugar in one sitting and contributing to the obesity crisis.

The charity Action on Sugar is also calling for a 20% sugar tax on all confectionery, which it says is the second highest source of sugar in children’s diets after soft drinks.

The ubiquity of new year diets and detoxes could extend beyond January and last all year, thanks to the Government’s latest suggested health guidelines. Public Health England (PHE) is demanding a “calorie-cap” on supermarket ready meals and fast food dishes.

The suggested ruling, which may come into effect in March, would limit breakfasts to 400 calories and lunches and dinners to 600 each.

Daily calorie consumption should be reduced to 1,800 calories a day, according to new health guidelines.

The current recommendation is for women to consume 2,000 calories a day and men 2,500 as part of a balanced diet.

But a new Public Health England (PHE) campaign next year is expected to recommend a ‘400-600-600’ rule. That means restricting food intake to 400 calories for breakfast, 600 for lunch and 600 for dinner.

An additional two healthy snacks of up to 100 calories each are permitted, bringing the total to 1,800 calories overall.

According to the government, adults currently consume an average of 200 to 300 more calories per day than they should.

That good man, Chris Snowdon, has something to say about this. But then so do I.

Let us assume, not necessarily a valid assumption but let us assume, that they’re right here.

This then tells us that Public Health England is entirely wrong about everything else they say about food. It’s not sugar, it’s not processed food, it’s not unhealthy food it’s simply the amount. We’re all fat because we consume more calories than we expend.

For, note something about historical diets. Back in WWII it was noted, during rationing, that those who got fewer than 2,900 calories a day lost weight. WWI frontline rations were 4,400 a day.

If PHE now says that it’s calorie intake which is the problem then it’s calorie intake which is the problem, isn’t it? Or, the balancing item, calorie usage.

Even, as I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s central heating to blame for us all being fatty lardbuckets.

This very insistence on calories is the very thing showing that all the other malarkey is wrong.

“The marketing: ‘The Giant Cheese Board’, “a massive, oversized cheese board. One you can walk around on as if you’re in a giants kitchen” – the best artisan cheeses from across Europe, including a huge baked Camembert, unlimited mulled wine, cheesecake and double-size fireplaces. The reality: plates of chopped up British cheeses, mostly hard, some caterers packs of chutney, no Camembert (baked or not), queues for cold and very sweet ‘low alcohol’ mulled wine, no cheesecake, and a screen projecting the image of a fire. Hmm.”

The humble sausage sandwich could contain nearly two-thirds of an adult’s maximum daily recommended intake of salt – more than a McDonald’s double cheeseburger and large fries, a health group has warned.

Yes, of course these are the argle bargle targets which don’t mean anything anyway.

The survey found that the average salt content of sausages was 1.3g per 100g, or 1.16g per typical portion of two sausages – a figure that has remained relatively unchanged since 2011, exceeding the salt reduction targets in place at that time. The maximum daily recommended intake for an adult is 6g.

The saltiest sausages were Iceland’s Jumbo Pork range, at 1.28g each, but that went up to 3.78g including the ingredients for a sandwich, compared with 3.22g for a McDonald’s double cheeseburger and large fries.

Ah. There’s salt in bread, isn’t there? It’s not the damn sausages in the first place.

And I’m sorry, but really, that’s what they’ve done. A sausage sandwich (two sausages per serving) has in the sausages one sixth to one third of the daily recommended salt allowance.

BTW, who is it that tells us about salt in bread? Err, yes, the same people talking about these sausage sandwiches.

The chief executive of Chapel Down, an official wine supplier to 10 Downing Street, has said Britons will “starve” if the door is closed to foreign fruit pickers after Brexit.

England’s biggest winemaker, based in Kent, relies on EU workers to pick grapes for its drinks, which also include beer, cider and gin.

In comments that are likely to cause embarrassment for No 10, the Chapel Down boss, Frazer Thompson, said: “The biggest potential impact of Brexit is on agricultural labour. Kent has had eastern Europeans picking fruit in recent years, but we’ll all starve if the labour issue is not sorted after Brexit.”

Trade.

Imports of food are actually the import of the labour used to grow the food.

They are a much loved late-night snack for revellers as they flock home at the end of a night.

But the future of the kebab is now hanging in the balance, after it emerged that the high street delicacy may be banned from Britain under European Union plans to combat heart disease.

A move by the European parliament to ban the phosphates necessary to keep seasoned kebab meat moist and flavoursome is said to pose a risk to kebabs.

They’re not necessary. They’re “necessary” only in the sense that meat cot off and being store until served needs to be kept moist. Somewhere that cuts off the, ermm, whatever the technical word for the stack of meat is, to order don’t need it. But this is wrong, wrong, wrong:

“Doner kebabs are a much loved staple in takeaways up and down the country and have been enjoyed since the 8th century BC.”

Complete bollocks. The doner kebab dates from around 1974 in Germany. There’s a certain little argument about precedence between two Turkish gastarbeiter but we do know that’s where it all started.

Bread and meat, salad on the side, sure, 8,000 BC. Sticking it all together into a sandwich, 1974-ish. And it’s the sticking it all together which is the doner. The real lesson of all of this being quite how long innovation can take…..

Britain is enjoying a remarkable apple boom, as hundreds of new community orchards revive lost varieties and contribute to a thriving heritage market.

According to Steve Oram, who is the apple diversity officer at the wildlife charity People’s Trust for Endangered Species: “We are adding new orchards to the register all the time. Some are in allotments, others in schools and even housing developments.

“After the postwar years of neglect and destruction, when 90% of the UK’s orchards were lost and supermarkets sold only a few varieties and imported 70 to 80% of their apples, it is very exciting.”

The Newquay community orchard in Cornwall was started in 2015 with a £66,000 crowdfunding appeal. More than 2,000 trees, including 120 local heritage varieties, have been planted on land donated by the Duchy of Cornwall.

If people want little orchards of native (well, you know) apples then people should have little orchards of native apples. As long as, of course, they’re creating and maintaining those little orchards of native apples at their own expense. This is, after all, what liberalism means, that the peeps get to do what the peeps want. And if we’re to add some Burkean conservatism so that it’s the little platoons sorting it out for themselves then all the better.

As long as no one is being forced to pay for this through taxation then what could possibly be the problem?

At another level this is climbing Maslow’s Pyramid again. At one level of income we’ll take fruit in the only way we can, seasonally and in a limited manner. We get richer, technology advances, we can have apples year round – but that does mean trade, commercially sized operations and the inevitable limited selection. We get richer again and now we’ve more than sufficiency, let’s have that variety back again.

After all, it’s not as if we’re not seeing this right across the food chain, is it?

That roast beef of Olde Englande was most certainly better than the bully beef from Argentina or the Fray Bentos pie. As is the best grass fed British beef of today. But we moved through the cycle to get from most not being able to eat any beef, to all being able to have bad beef, to now again thinking more about the quality – we have a more than sufficiency of beef and can be picky about it.

There’s plenty you could do to make it a more sustainable industry. You could slow the growing time and give birds more room on farms, using less engineered breeds that take 12 weeks, rather than just over a month to reach slaughter weight. That would help curb some of the cruellest aspects of the business, which see densely packed, overbred birds, prone to disease and bacterial infection, collapsing under their own weight. But that would cost more. In the factory you could slow the speed of the lines, so that cross-contamination of carcasses was less likely, and workers’ jobs less relentlessly tough and unpleasant, thus easing the pressure to break hygiene rules and making the sector more attractive to local staff. But that, too, would cost more.

We know roughly how much more, since the top end of organic production already does these things, and a posh chicken from that sort of outlet is three to four times as expensive as a conventional supermarket one. But there are hardly votes in arguing we should pay that much for our chicken. Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding Marie Antoinette-ish. But the price of cheap is too high, and we should probably be eating something else.

Felicity Lawrence in The Guardian. We should all be paying much more for our food because…..well, actually, because Lady Muck here thinks it’s all too cheap.

‘It’s good, but it’s not quite Carling,’ according to the advertising slogan.
As it turns out, it’s not as good as it says it is on the label.
The company behind the lager has dodged a £50 million tax bill because the drink is weaker than advertised.
Carling is marketed in Britain at 4 per cent alcohol strength, but brewers Molson Coors have admitted it is weaker for tax reasons. Court documents reveal the lager has been made to a strength of about 3.7 per cent for the past five years.
But Molson Coors did not change the strength recorded on Carling labels to prevent drinkers from ‘demanding a slice’ of the saving, tribunal documents said. The brewer insists customers have not been misled and its labelling was ‘entirely consistent with the law’.
The details emerged in a tax tribunal brought against the beer makers by HMRC over an alleged unpaid multi-million-pound duty bill.

There was, back in the heyday of the plastic beers, one which was withdrawn from sale once the strength had to be publicly announced. It was brewed to a strength where it wasn’t really alcohol you see, at least not in what duty had to be paid although it was sold in pubs at something close to the price of other beers.

The 18 piglets and two sows survived the fire in Wiltshire in February, which saw 60 tonnes of hay catch fire.
…
The animals were given a six-month stay of execution when they were rescued from the farm at Milton Lilbourne.
But, having been reared for meat they have since been slaughtered and the sausages were delivered to the fire station team, which barbecued them.

British retailers have called for the government to take tougher action on tackling obesity and consider mandatory measures to ensure more companies make their products healthier.

Public health bosses have urged food manufacturers to make chips, pizzas, crisps and burgers healthier, and ministers are expected to issue “strong guidance” on how to reformulate products popular with children.

However, the British Retail Consortium, which represents more than 90 retailers including major chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, said the government would need to move beyond voluntary agreements if it wanted to make a real difference.

“We believe voluntary approaches only take us so far,” said Andrea Martinez-Inchausti, deputy director of food and sustainability at the BRC.

“If you really want to make a difference then there is a need for stronger measures. Taxes might be one of way of doing it but there are alternatives to taxes such as mandatory targets.”

To translate. We know the demanded changes will make everything taste like shit. So, none of us will do it voluntarily, fearing loss of business. You know, the punters just don’t like stuff that tastes of shit.